text: ** Assembly of ITER, which has been under construction for years, commences.
  ** The Chinese experimental nuclear fusion reactor HL-2M is turned on for the first time, achieving its first plasma discharge.
  **  China's EAST tokamak sets a new world record for superheated plasma, sustaining a temperature of 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds and a peak of 160 million degrees Celsius for 20 seconds.
  **  The National Ignition Facility achieves generating 70% of the input energy, necessary to sustain fusion, from inertial confinement fusion energy, an 8x improvement over previous experiments in spring 2021 and a 25x increase over the yields achieved in 2018.
  ** The first Fusion Industry Association report was published - "The global fusion industry in 2021"
  **  China's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), a nuclear fusion reactor research facility, sustained plasma at 70 million degrees Celsius for as long as 1,056 seconds (17 minutes, 36 seconds), achieving the new world record for sustained high temperatures (fusion energy however requires i.a. temperatures over 150 million °C).
  **  The Joint European Torus in Oxford, UK, reports 59 megajoules produced with nuclear fusion over five seconds (11 megawatts of power), more than double the previous record of 1997.
  **  United States researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California has recorded the first case of ignition on August 8, 2021. Producing an energy yield of 0.72, of laser beam input to fusion output.
  **  Building on the achievement in August 2022, American researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California recorded the first ever net energy production with nuclear fusion, producing more fusion energy than laser beam put in. Laser efficiency was in the order of 1%.
  **  On February 15, 2023, Wendelstein 7-X reached a new milestone: Power plasma with gigajoule energy turnover generated for eight minutes.
  ** JT-60SA achieves first plasma in October, making it the largest operational superconducting tokamak in the world.
  **The Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) achieved the new record of 102-sec-long operation (Integrated RMP control for ELM-less H-mode with a notable advancement on the favorable control the error field, Tungsten divertor) with the achieved duration of 48 seconds at the high-temperature of about 100 million degrees Celsius in February 2024, after the last record of 45-sec-long operation (ELM-less H-mode (FIRE mode), Carbon-based divertor, 2022). See  and  (21 March 2024).